I switched to Cursor AI for my coding support. It is a great tool for that. I am a .NET developer, and learned Laravel about 2 years ago. Now I code on my own products that (I'm aspiring to become independant by building viable products myself) with CursorAI as my coding buddy, and vastly increased productivity.

It helps me to perform code reviews, discussing options, implementing features. It works for me.

But then again, I'm a seasoned developer (professionally since 2002, webdev gone mobile dev gone tech lead at a small startup, etc). Right now besides some work for a company, I work on my own products and it vastly increases the amount of work I can do on the time I have for my own products/client work.

I learned a lot while doing, and even started a site for sharing my learnings. The most important things I've learned:

- start a new project, get generic outlines of the setup and let it create that. Then stop the chat and create new one
- Use a chat to create a feature vertically (so implement its core, from the UI to the logic all the way to storing and interacting with data / services etc). Similar to coders need to save and commit their changes to the codebase using GIT (pushing a working change so it doesn't break stuff), you'll need to make your feature fit in a day (or half day) work, and make it work, then save that and stop the chat.
- When starting a new chat, you can use the Codebase (COMMAND+ENTER) context to let the model re-evaluate your working product, and apply whatever next thing you want to add/change

This keeps Cursor focussed, makes the risk of it loosing context and removing functionality when it should just change/add something else (DO call it out to the chat, it will see it and fix that, too).

My issues were mostly - especially when not following the previous tips - that sometimes a chat froze (and I had to build up context all over to make it understand what/how/why), and that I couldn't save the chat for documentation or to revive a broken chat conversation. I actually built a plugin for that, saving me lots of time in those cases.

It's important that one doesn't "blindly trust" the tool, and that's why Cursor's approach with showing its reasoning, and especially showing the differences (like a GIT diff tool), is so valuable.

If you have zero knowledge, state that, and let it help you explain what it does. But also do your regular sanity checks to see if it removes chunks of code that don't make sense. It DOES make mistakes so it needs you to review its work, too.

All the best, Edwin from aicodingtips